The Thursday Night Tea Research Group Event Report | LOVE with Claire Nioche-Sibony

By Anisha Joshi

Class of 2022

How do we love, why do we love, and why do we love the people we love? For the third installment of the series on intimacy organized by the Thursday Night Tea Research Group, Claire Nioche-Sibony walked us through some classical psychoanalytical ideas about love, from Lacan to Freud, and examined love from her perspective as a psychoanalyst who has been practicing for ten years. Currently an assistant professor at the Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, Nioche-Sibony’s research concerns issues of singularity, nomadism, madness and writing, and has drawn on the theoretical works of Derrida, Deleuze, Freud and Lacan, among others.

‘We may know very well that we are addicted to someone. What is happening then?’ Nioche-Sibony began the talk by explaining how although common imaginations about addiction surround drugs, food, gambling or even sex, we often do not realize the far more pervasive type of addiction- emotional addiction. Harder to recognize, it shapes how we understand the world and respond to it. And why is it that when it comes to love, we keep repeating the same pattern of giddy excitement followed by disillusionment? Continue reading “The Thursday Night Tea Research Group Event Report | LOVE with Claire Nioche-Sibony”

Spring into Literature Reading Series Presents: Alice Xin Liu

Date and Time: Thursday April 8, 12pm China

Location: IB 1047

Zoom: 721 869 9461

Guest Speaker’s Bio: Freelance writer and translator Alice Xin Liu has translated books by Shen Congwen and Han Han, subtitled movies for Feng Xiaogang, worked as an editor, journalist, and podcaster, and published writing in n+1, Granta, the Guardian, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel. Raised partly in China and partly in Britain, she lives in Beijing, where she continues to bridge the worlds of English and Chinese letters.

*Lunch provided!

Media and Arts Speaker Series | Capturing Reality

The Media & Arts Speaker Series at Duke Kunshan University is a bi-weekly event that invites leading practitioners in media and arts to speak about their work and practice and engage with our DKU community.

The fourth miniseries of talks looks at the concept of the lab, both as a philosophy and a methodology to see how these innovative approaches have impacted and transformed the production of culture, art and society.

The lecture scheduled on Friday April 9th, 2021 at 6pm China Central time features artist, photojournalist and co-founder of Sensorium Matthew Niederhauser. He will share with us his insights in the emerging area of XR technology and its creative potential and introduce some of his works in this area. This series is organized and hosted by Prof. Benjamin Bacon and Prof. Vivian and supported by Arts and Humanities and the Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University. This event is open to the public.

Location: Duke Kunshan Innovation Building 1042

Zoom: 262-835-7204

Capturing Reality

http://www.sensorium.works/

https://www.onx.studio/

Matthew Niederhauser will introduce and break down emerging creative possibilities of emerging XR technologies and how they shaped projects from Sensorium, an experiential studio he cofounded in New York. Matthew’s artistic practice draws from a diverse range of influences, including journalism, cinema, theater, and game design, all of which pushed his expanded sense of experimentation and how he integrates concepts across both digital and physical spaces. He believes that such an interdisciplinary focus is now needed to take immersive storytelling to new imaginative and communicative potentials. Continue reading “Media and Arts Speaker Series | Capturing Reality”

HHL Luncheon & Project Sharing

Location: Water Pavilion

Zoom ID: 530.394.0458

Time: 11:45 am-12:45pm, April 1st, Thursday  China Time

The Health Humanities Lab luncheon is a status update on all of the current projects sponsored by the HHL. Each team will present their work and it will be recorded over Zoom so that other groups interested in the new call for proposals will have the opportunity to learn from the examples of successful project proposals.

HHL Exhibition: Public Square 2.0

Location: AB Lobby

Zoom ID: 865 588 9767

Time: 10am-8pm (with a special event at 11:30am) – April 1st – China Time

Public Square 2.0 is a video-based multi-screen installation about people’s interactions within public space, as a reflection of people’s relationships within a community in Beijing in the COVID-19 context. The videos screened within are documentations of human interactions in a community in Beijing during the COVID-19 outbreak from March to August in 2020. Each video highlights different parts of a communal square, documenting individuals and their daily activities within it at different times.

When it comes to the DKU community, for students, staff and faculty abroad, most of them are still unable to return to campus due to the pandemic. The installation is located in the AB lobby and with a MaxHub whiteboard that allows for real-time interactions through Zoom to connect the entire DKU community during the ongoing pandemic.

The pandemic has affected people’s lives all around the world. Even now, people’s outdoor activities are more or less restricted. And for some, the access to face-to-face interactions is still difficult. Within this context, this project wants to explore how we can increase interactions and strengthen bonds in the DKU community. What roles can communal space play in this process? How can we, as a community, support each other, and tell each other that we will face the challenges together?

For people online, you are greatly welcomed to join the exhibition virtually. Please feel free to interact with people on campus and annotate on the virtual whiteboard to share your feelings and thoughts.

Third Space Lab – Guest Speaker Series – Adrian Holliday on Third Space Methodology

Dear all,

You are cordially invited to the guest lecture of the Third Space Lab by Dr. Adrian Holliday (Canterbury Christ Church University). We hope you will join us!
Please RSVP here: https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dbs44bUulnr63NY

Date: April 9th, 2021

Time: 5 pm (China time)/5 am (EST)/10 am (UK time)

Zoom Meeting ID: 936 1008 0413

Third-space methodology: Finding deCentred threads in small culture formation on the go

The biggest barrier to intercultural travel is its framing as between large, national or civilisational ‘cultures’. This framing falsely claims, for example, that (a) Western and Eastern people are essentially different to each other because their behaviour and values are determined by these separate large ‘cultures’, and that (b) learning a second language requires the native-speakerist activity of learning a second large ‘culture’. This large-culture approach originates from a racist, structural-function­al­­ist, Orientalist, Centre, Western grand narrative that falsely separates the world into superior individualist and inferior collectivist ‘cultures’. It therefore creates essentialist blocks that pull us apart.
Intercultural travel instead requires deCentred threads. This is not learning the ‘other culture’. Although we are brought up differently in our national systems, with different histories, practices and architectures, we share everyday, common, hybrid, underlying, intercultural experience ‘on the go’ such as going to school for the first time, visiting friends’ families, and joining new work and leisure groups. This existing underlying intercultural competence needs to be recalled as the best resource for engaging with more distant intercultural realities. However, ‘us’-‘them’ prejudice is everywhere and makes us vulnerable to blocking large-culture grand narratives. Third-space methodology is the hard and uncomfortable, intersubjective work of rooting out and putting aside prejudice in a new, deCentred, decolonising, thinking-as-usual. We can then see culture as creative, flowing, changing, hybrid, boundary dissolving and figurative, rather than confining and separating.

About the speaker

Adrian Holliday is a professor of applied linguistics and intercultural education at Canterbury Christ Church University. After completing his Bachelor’s in sociology in 1971 and beginning his career as a teacher of English, History, Economics and Sociology in London, he embarked on a six-year international experience as an English teacher and then English program manager in Iran, from 1973 to 1979. After returning to the UK and completing a masters degree at Lancaster University, from 1980-1985, he was involved in setting up the English for Special Purposes Centre at Damascus University in Syria. This is now the successful Higher Languages Institute. Then, in 1985-1990, Professor Holliday was involved in a national university curriculum project in Egypt which comprised 18 universities across the country. The experiences during this project provided him material for his Ph.D. at Lancaster University, which he received in 1990. He headed the Graduate School at Canterbury Christ Church University from 2002-2017, providing academic management for research degrees, and was a program director for the Ph.D.s in Applied Linguistics and in Education. He also chaired the  British Association of TESOL Qualifying Institutions and helped set up the British Institute of English Language Teaching. Throughout his career, he has been developing his thinking and writing around the relationship between the individual, culture and social structures. His long-standing relationship with Iran and the Middle East has provided him with an awareness of the global politics which surround these relationships.

This event will be recorded and posted on the Third Space Lab’s Sakai site for all to view.

Confronting Anti-Asian Hate: Gendered, Racialized, and Transnational Perspectives

IB 1047 / Zoom: 451 154 2347

Thursday April 1, 11:00 AM – 13:00 PM China

Guest Speakers:

Lunch will be provided

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and the Freedom Lab

In the past year, members of Asian descent have been the targets of hate crimes and other forms of systemic violence. These acts, particularly those that have taken place across the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Europe, have, for the most part, singled out the most vulnerable members of Asian communities, including the elderly, the working-class, and women. Most recently, the mass murders of 8 people in Atlanta, Georgia on March 16, 2021, six of whom are Asian women laboring in the massage parlor industry, have ignited a wave of social movements calling for the end of intersectional racism, misogyny, and discrimination against those who are engaged in sex work, along those who labor in beauty, nail, and massage parlors. What is the significance of this event, particularly for those in the Asian-American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in the U.S.? What debates around race, gender, and labor have proliferated around the U.S. and the world since the shootings? How can the histories and experiences of migration, labor, and activism among Asian immigrants and their allies cast new light on building cross-cultural ties between Asia, China, and their diasporic groups in the Global South (Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America)? Continue reading “Confronting Anti-Asian Hate: Gendered, Racialized, and Transnational Perspectives”

Film Screening with Filmmaker | In Wuhan (Last Screening Salon of the Year)

Time and Date: Thursday April 1st, 7pm China Time

IB-1008 / Zoom ID: 530.390.0458

Snacks & Refreshments Provided

In Wuhan is a documentary that reveals the scene inside Wuhan during the earliest days of the pandemic. The film is a deep dive into the many logistical and humanitarian concerns involved in locking down and quarantining a city of 11 million people overnight. Please join us in watching the film followed by a in person Q&A with the filmmaker (Zhang Yue) who was in Wuhan during the citywide lockdown.